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IT-Analysis: Linux To Become A De Facto Standard

"IBM, Hewlett-Packard and Sun Microsystems, among others, are
creating an imperative. Their infrastructure initiatives, entitled
respectively; On Demand, Adaptive Enterprise and N1, are all quite
similar and aimed at the idea of virtualising the hardware layer.
The primary reason for wanting to virtualise hardware is this; in
the last five years or so companies have been buying servers in an
ad hoc manner, tending to deploy them on a one server per
application basis.

"Consequently, they assembled server farms which turn out to
have an average hardware utilization of about 20 percent. This is,
of course, a waste of money and, in the long run, a management
headache. However there are other imperatives, particularly the
idea of being able to provide infrastructure as a
service--dynamically, i.e. you pay for what you use and you get
what you need when you need it..."